Search form

Birthright Citizenship Isn’t Just the Law, It’s Crucial to Assimilation in the U.S

In an Axios interview this week, President Trump said he planned
to issue an executive order to repeal birthright citizenship, a law
he described as “ridiculous.”

The legal argument against such a move is overwhelming: It would
reverse about 1,000 years of Anglo-American common law and violate
the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even worse, experience
here and in Europe shows that ending birthright citizenship would
limit how well immigrants and their descendants assimilate and
become Americans.

Birthright citizenship — if you’re born here, you’re an
American — means that every descendant of immigrants has a
stake in this nation and does not grow up in a legal underclass.
When the U.S.-born children of immigrants — those here with a
green card or a specialized temporary work visa, those who arrived
as refugees or, yes, those who are here illegally — become
automatic citizens, they and their families also become part of the
community. U.S. history shows it, and so does recent history in
Germany.

Traditionally, German citizenship was a matter of blood. For the
most part, your parents must have been German for you to be a full
citizen. Those laws created an assimilation crisis. Guest worker
programs in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s admitted a large
number of Turks, Tunisians, Portuguese and others who were needed
to work in the growing post-war economy. Despite German government
intentions, many of these workers stayed on and had children, but
the children weren’t automatically citizens.

Far from ridiculous, it
guarantees that immigrants and their children are woven tightly
into the American fabric. Let’s keep it in place, and the 14th
Amendment intact.

The situation led to a few generations of resentful, displaced
youths with only partial allegiance to the nation of their birth.
Noncitizens born in Germany formed “parallel
societies.” They were more prone to crime and political
ideologies like radical Islamism or Kurdish nationalism. Their
discontents have played out in German cities, most recently, in the
form of Kurdish-German attacks on Turkish-German cultural
centers.

The German Parliament took action to boost assimilation. In
1999, it extended citizenship to some children of non-Germans born
on or after January 1, 2000 and a handful of those born in the
previous decade. According to a growing body of academic evidence,
the positive effect was indisputable.

Immigrant parents of children newly covered by birthright
citizenship gained more German friends, spoke more German, and read
German newspapers more than others. They enrolled their children in
preschool at a higher rate and started them earlier in primary
school, which prompted a rise in German language proficiency and a
decrease in social and emotional problems.

The fertility of immigrants with birthright-citizen children
fell, childhood obesity among them was reduced, and other health
measures improved. Immigrants and their children, especially women,
began to marry later and less often, in a pattern similar to
Germans. These women were also more likely to marry men who were
not from their own country of origin — another sign of good
social integration.

The National Academies of Sciences’ recent report on
studies of immigrant assimilation in the United States starts from
the position that birthright citizenship is fundamental to the
nation: It “is one of the most powerful mechanisms of formal
political and civic inclusion in the United States.”

Unfortunately, Trump and his party largely disagree.

About 62% of Republicans think that immigrants today
are less willing to adapt to American life than immigrants were a
century ago, compared with just 17% of Democrats who hold that
view. The last time a poll on the citizenship question was taken,
in 2015, about half of Republicans wanted to amend the
Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship — and the more
conservative members of the tea party favored repeal by an almost
20-point margin, 57% to 40%.

That makes conservative voices like those of Reihan Salam,
author and National Review executive editor, all the more
important. Salam favors birthright citizenship because otherwise we
will be consumed by “the issues raised by creating a large
class of stateless persons” born here without rights and no
way to assimilate.

As University of Washington economist Jacob Vigdor summed up in
his research on recent immigrants, fears of a lack of assimilation
in the United States are overblown. “Basic indicators … from
naturalization to English ability, are if anything stronger now
than they were” in the Ellis Island era. The law guaranteeing
birthright citizenship is part of the reason. Far from ridiculous,
it guarantees that immigrants and their children are woven tightly
into the American fabric. Let’s keep it in place, and the
14th Amendment intact.